"The Best Celebrity" is out of the circle! How do Internet celebrities attract attention?

This year, the comedy film "Hot Man" has attracted much attention. The film tells the story of a taxi driver named Lao Zhang who has nothing going his way, but unexpectedly becomes popular because of an accidental "rights protection" video uploaded to the Internet. As Lao Zhang becomes an "Internet celebrity", more and more stories have emerged: the original "rights protection brother" was called a "drama brother" because he helped others bring goods, and after being criticized by netizens, he took the opportunity to "whitewash" and reversed himself by "slandering" himself.

In the past decade, mobile Internet and social media have become indispensable in people's lives. As of June 2024, the number of mobile Internet users in my country is nearly 1.1 billion, and the number of social media users worldwide has exceeded 5 billion. With the rise of social media, "Internet celebrities" who have attracted thousands of attention and have many fans can drive huge traffic, influence social opinion and even economic activities.

"Content output" and "creating a persona" are important means to become an Internet celebrity and maintain popularity. The movie shows the behind-the-scenes promoters of Internet celebrities - network economy companies (MCNs). In addition to the artificially created "technology and hard work", inciting emotions is also an important means. The attention processing theory in psychology believes that motivation-related stimuli that can meet needs and affect goal achievement have priority in visual attention. Compared with neutral stimuli, information that can meet people's psychological needs is more likely to gain attention. Various Internet celebrities in MCN companies are meeting the different psychological needs of different audiences in various ways. Once "catching the eye", people will turn their cognitive resources to the priority processing attention target, which is the first step to influence emotions and behaviors.

Research has found that both moral and emotional information are motivation-related stimuli and are more likely to capture the audience's attention. Because emotional processing has survival significance and is related to survival and social needs, emotional information has priority in visual attention. For example, quickly discovering frightening stimuli can help avoid danger, and quickly identifying other people's emotional states can help recognize the social environment. Therefore, attention to emotional information is a fast and automatic process. Compared with neutral words, emotionally colored words are easier to distinguish, people can notice emotional expressions more quickly, and will pay more attention to facial expressions. Many videos also use close-ups of expressions to attract people's attention because of this feature.

On the other hand, morality, as a social norm, can satisfy people's needs for a sense of belonging and the psychological need to "believe in a just world", and can also help people understand society. Therefore, online information related to morality is more likely to attract attention. Under laboratory conditions, when people's need for justice is stimulated, they will be more easily attracted by words related to justice. Zhang Beijing's "personality" is "rights protection brother", and this label itself has moral attributes: he is upholding justice. His audience may choose him because he has a strong sense of right and wrong, just to see "justice being upheld." Therefore, compared with other anchors, Zhang Beijing, as a "good man in Beijing", will be more likely to attract the attention of the audience to "moral issues."

Moral judgment involves complex cognitive processing between sensibility and rationality, so as to distinguish what is right and what is wrong. However, in the network environment of information explosion, people will not spend too much cognitive resources to deeply process and analyze the news they see. One way to save cognitive resources is to label and simply classify things, which can easily lead to "black or white" and "following the crowd". Once the original "good label" has problems, it is particularly easy to backfire.

Research has found that people will quickly make moral judgments about occupations at the initial stage of information processing. Those occupations that are respected in themselves will be even more disliked once they are seen doing immoral things. For example, when Zhang Beijing first became popular, he was labeled as the "rights protection brother", a representative of justice who seeks welfare for others. However, bringing goods is related to one's own interests, so he becomes an egoist who "values ​​profit over righteousness". Because of over-generalization and simple labeling, "rights protection" and "bringing goods" cannot coexist, and once there is a cross-border relationship, "personality collapses". On the Internet, once a certain point of view is formed, it is easy to cause extremism within the group, that is, the attitudes and opinions of people within the group will become more extreme after discussion, and exclude those with different opinions. At this time, it is not far from "cyber violence".

In the movie, Zhang Beijing went from becoming unexpectedly popular and building up an image to having his character collapse and suffering from online violence. In the end, he repented. In the live broadcast of his "comeback", he originally wanted to whitewash himself by selling misery, but Zhang Beijing instead achieved the goal of attracting traffic to his opponent by stimulating the audience's "disgust" towards himself. It is what is meant by "giving someone a taste of their own medicine".

At the end of the movie, Zhang Beijing, who has returned to being an ordinary person, is no longer recognizable. After taking off his mask, he stretches lazily, feeling relieved, saying, "I finally feel relaxed." But as viewers who are deeply trapped in the Internet, can they not be troubled and free themselves from the Internet? "Not paying attention" may be the first step to breaking the deadlock.

Written by Wang Richu, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences